Say Anything At All
by Serrafina
Summary: Maybe, since she hadn’t learned to play the piano, she should have learned not to say anything at all.


Title: Say Anything At All (or Five Confessions)

Disclaimer: Don't own 'em.

Characters/Pairings: Kara, Kara/Zak, Kara/Lee, Kara/Sam

Spoilers: Through 4.14, Blood on the Scales

Note: Thanks to tracyj23 for the beta!

Summary: _Maybe, since she hadn't learned to play the piano, she should have learned not to say anything at all._

* * *

Kara was never very good at being quiet. She used to think that it was okay to be noisy if the noises you made were pretty, like her daddy's music. But she didn't have the patience for it, and her momma didn't like the racket. Still, Kara couldn't keep quiet.

* * *

Once, when Kara was very small, her father took her to visit his mother in the nursing home. Nana was older than anyone else in the world, and her breath came thick and heavy. Her voice, when she spoke, was low and rough and made Kara think of something she'd seen on TV, something skeletal and scaly and not entirely human. Nana wore cloying, oppressive perfume and never moved from her armchair. Kara didn't like the perfume, and didn't like when she had to sit on the edge of the chair, close enough to feel Nana's breath and to make out the lines and spots beneath the cheap cosmetics.

Kara was scared of Nana's voice in her ear, so when her daddy put on the radio she leapt off the armchair and started running around the room in time to the music. Daddy called it dancing. Momma called it foolish. Momma wasn't there though, so Kara raised her arms high and let her feet pound against the floor.

Until she tripped and knocked over a little table. Nana got angry and Kara wanted to keep running but she picked herself up off the floor and her daddy helped her clean up the mess. Later, though, while she was playing by herself (and doing her very best to sit still) in the hall, she heard her daddy raising his voice.

"_You shouldn't have yelled at her, Mom. She's only a child, my child."_

"_Children should be seen and not heard."_

Kara didn't know how to be silent, and decided that she didn't care much what Nana thought of her. But when she woke up one morning—almost two months later to the day—and her daddy hadn't come home, she wondered if he would have stayed if she'd just understood what Nana had meant. Maybe, since she hadn't learned to play the piano, she should have learned not to say anything at all.

* * *

When Kara arrived at the Academy she was eighteen years old and high on her sudden freedom while other cadets were bemoaning the rigidity of the regulations and their hard-ass instructors that shouted and demanded. Kara didn't mind any of that. And she really didn't mind living in a bunkroom with half a dozen other rowdy, fresh-faced and sometimes violence-prone men and women. She liked seeing her bunk and locker full of the things that belonged to her and no one else. For the first time in her life, she felt like she fit in this space.

And she went running every day.

She had wondered, before she started, if sleeping in a room full of strangers would be a problem. Wondered if she would be able to relax with so many unknown quantities. The first night she made sure she was exhausted by the time she lay back in her rack, but soon found that exhausted or no, she liked the dull clamor of six cadets moving and breathing, murmuring and laughing, sighing and living.

Momma had taught Kara discipline, had demanded that she learn to be silent. But Kara had hated those lessons. She'd never really been good at being quiet. Now she didn't have to be.

* * *

She liked running and fighting and learning the mechanics of a Viper, inside and out. She hadn't gotten to fly yet, but she liked watching the others in the sims and on the training reels. She liked triad and misbehaving and most things about her new life. She liked being Starbuck best of all.

One disadvantage, though, to leading a lifestyle of reckless abandon was that she sometimes forgot to control her tongue when it counted.

Sometimes it was in front of an instructor. These times usually led to a reprimand, push-ups and very occasionally, a couple hours in hack. And sometimes Kara was sorry, mostly if the disciplinary action had kept her away from a party, but she wasn't overly bothered. Certainly not enough to curb her tongue.

She kept her act more-or-less together, and she graduated. Did a round on the Triton. Came back with a few more disciplinary citations—that CAG had been a real stickler. Back at the Academy now, but on the other side of the lectern, she still hadn't learned to curb her tongue. Most of the time, she didn't need to. She could say anything she wanted in just about any way she wanted to her cadets. Most of her fellow instructors didn't care too much about Starbuck and her boisterous attitude, though occasionally her mouth got her in trouble with the higher-ups. Still, she didn't regret it, _couldn't_ regret it.

But there was one time, one time with Zak Adama. They had been together about three months, giddy and high on each other.

She hadn't told him it was her birthday, didn't know how he'd found out, but she came back to her quarters from classes and found the door unlocked and him waiting patiently inside. She'd given him a key just a few weeks ago—it made sneaking around easier if they weren't always coming and going together. So while she hadn't been expecting him, she wasn't entirely surprised.

She was tired though, from too-eager nuggets and a fellow instructor who had insisted on butting heads with her. Zak had seen it immediately, before she'd said a word, and gently ushered her into the tiny head.

Hours later, she was lying half on top of him in the bed, her cheek pressed against his chest and one hand curling around the place where his neck met his shoulder. His left hand was resting on her hip while his right hand drew lazy circles over the back of her neck. He shifted slightly beneath her, just so he could press his lips against her hair.

"Happy birthday," he said, voice low and near her ear. She could feel his breath passing over her head as he spoke, and his hands pressing lightly into her skin, and the rest of him with the rest of her.

Maybe she was high on endorphins or maybe it was something else, but it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to say, "I love you."

His right hand paused for a moment, then continued with the concentric circles. She didn't lift her head to look at him, but she knew that he was smiling that foolish, hopelessly happy smile that had been half the reason she'd gone out with him in the first place.

She thought maybe she should be scared, but instead she closed her eyes and let the feel of him lull her to sleep.

They both roused later in the evening, and Zak dragged her over to the couch where he presented her with something wrapped in plain brown paper. Whatever it was, it was lumpy and heavy in her hands as she tore at the paper.

When the wrapping yielded to reveal a metal statue of Aphrodite (to match the Artemis figurine she kept hidden away—she didn't even know he'd seen it, didn't know how he'd known when she'd never told him) she knew what it meant. As her fingers traced the etched bronze she swallowed the first shards of something like fear and wished, for a moment, that she could take it back before it—he—was taken from her.

* * *

She couldn't take it back. Like everything else she said or did, she couldn't erase her past misdeeds. This one would stain her for all eternity.

Two years and a few months later, she thought the reckoning might be coming sooner than expected. Maybe this was it.

She saw Lee in the memorial hall the day after the days that wouldn't end (until they did, finally, along with the Olympic Carrier and its passengers). He was staring, unfocused, at the pictures before him, and she knew that none of them had been put there by his hand.

She paused beside him, leaning against the bulkhead and waiting for...she didn't know what.

"My mother's dead," he said eventually.

Frak, she couldn't deal with this. She said the first words she could think to say: "So's mine." _Years ago, and nobody went to her funeral. _And just like that, she felt something tight and dark uncoiling within her. _My mother is dead. _It was as though this _thing_, this dark thing that she had never noticed before had been hidden inside, strangling her, and now it was easing, shifting, moving. Now that she knew that darkness was there it might just be spreading, but she felt like she could breathe for the first time.

Lee didn't say anything, and she was glad.

* * *

For someone who had been apparently ignorant to her existence for the last two years, and who hadn't been terribly attentive to her in the first place, Lee was suddenly, inexplicably, everywhere in her life and she didn't understand why.

She didn't know why she'd bothered to hunt down the dress and all that went with it, though she now remembered why she hated heels. Even Zak had never seen her in a dress. They'd joked about what she might wear to the wedding, that he might just walk down the aisle and let her stand there in a suit.

But that night, with her feet crammed into shoes of unnatural height, and with her wrists trailing gossamer blue streams that weren't _her_, she wasn't thinking about Zak at all.

Maybe Lee was though, because he never quite seemed comfortable with this incarnation of her, and he relinquished her hand after just two songs. Hours later, she'd had a few too many drinks and couldn't quite remember how she'd—they'd—ended up in bed together, but she let go and let herself feel his lips on her neck, his hips and hers, the smooth lines of his back beneath her dragging nails.

Then. Well. Just as everything was coming together, she hardly noticed her lips forming the words, but suddenly there they were: _"Oh, Lee."_

And then the fall. The crash. In that moment, she couldn't remember reality ever stinging so much.

As she gathered the blue dress around herself and rushed from the room, her fancy shoes clutched in one hand, she thought that maybe she did understand why Lee was _everywhere_. She just wished she didn't. Wished he wasn't. Wished she hadn't.

Two days later she stood beneath the Caprican sun with an old friend she'd given up for dead, and slips of the tongue (especially _that_ one) seemed like a distant memory, belonging to someone else in some other lifetime. She felt like they'd all been in stasis, and now she'd finally woken from the dream and found out the real world had all gone to Tartarus.

Many things seemed pointless on the irradiated husk of her homeworld, among them regret.

* * *

She told Sam she was coming back. She meant it.

She didn't regret going back for him, not ever, and tried to tell herself she never regretted going to Caprica in the first place. Some days were harder than others.

The day Leoben came back into her life she swore not to tell the Cylon anything. She kept her promise. Mostly. She didn't say anything she didn't mean to say. In those four months she learned quiet and stillness in ways she never had before. And when Sam carried her out of that place, it was to a world she no longer recognized.

The places had stayed the same but the players had changed. Or maybe she'd just changed.

Lee was doing that _everywhere_ thing again, except this time he managed to be nowhere at the same time. Sam was in and out of her life, and she was too tired to try to sort any of it out. When he would come she couldn't think of a reason to turn him away and when he would leave she couldn't think of a reason to ask him to stay. So she did neither.

The nights she spent by herself were spent tossing and turning, dreaming and waking and, very occasionally, praying. The nights she spent with him were easier in some ways, harder in others.

The frakking …well, that was easy. It was what came after that gave her the trouble. Harder to stay awake with a warm body beside her. And harder, too, in the dim light between consciousness and unconsciousness, to breathe with that warmth beside her. She knew now that Cylons were warm too, that they breathed and they slept and they bled. She knew that they loved, too, or said they did.

She didn't sleep much. She ran and she flew and she frakked her husband, and someone else's too. One night she and Sam went to Joe's and got spectacularly drunk. He did, anyway; let the records show that Kara Thrace could drink anyone and everyone under the table.

She didn't care to analyze it, but for some reason her mind was straying that night to Kacey and Leoben and porch swings. Sam was laughing over something, the gods knew what, and his hands around her waist were pulling her closer as he just about collapsed from laughter on her shoulder.

"I wish it had been true," she said. "I wish it had all been true."

"What's that, baby?" Sam said, still giggling against her.

"Nothing," she said, and kissed him.

He probably wouldn't remember come morning. She wished she could forget.

* * *

She couldn't forget any of it. Couldn't forget Leoben or the mandala or Earth, _motherfrakking Earth_, or the scent of rotted flesh going up in flames. She couldn't forget Sam either, although some days she wanted to.

Today she could feel the cool metal of the bulkhead against her back through her tanks. She stared, unfocused, at the bustle of sickbay and the partitions that were keeping her out.

"Kara."

She blinked and looked up to find Lee kneeling beside her. He looked tired and concerned, but safe.

"Kara," he said again, "why are you sitting here?"

She looked around. She was sitting on the floor against the bulkhead, just inside the hatch. She shrugged and didn't say anything. Lee placed his hand on top of hers, where it rested on one bent knee. Her eyes were drawn to their hands, but then she saw the blood and knew that it stained her hands, her arms, her face, her neck, her chest...

She pulled her hand away from his and pushed herself upright, on her feet now against the bulkhead. She was Kara Thrace, or some facsimile of her, and she faced things on her feet.

Lee straightened up in front of her, close but not touching. His voice, when he spoke, was soft and gentle, as though he were talking to some wild animal, a predator maybe that spooked easily.

"Kara, do you—have you heard—do you know?"

She shook her head from side to side in a harsh, jerky motion. This body wasn't obeying her demands. She laughed suddenly. Why should it? "I don't know anything." Then the words were pouring out, and she couldn't stop them even if she wanted to. "I don't know what I am anymore. I don't know who I am. I don't want to be just ashes, or somebody's ghost, or another frakking copy, and I..."

He took a step closer, his hands finding her own blood-stained ones. "I know who you are," he said.

Looking into his eyes, she believed him. She pulled her right hand out of his grasp and brought it up to curl around the back of his neck. She took a deep breath and let it out. "I don't know, but...I know that this thing between you and me...I just _know_." And maybe that was enough. He was there, she was there, and they were holding onto each other. She closed her eyes and leaned into him.

* * *

Kara Thrace had an unfortunate habit of saying things she didn't want said. Sometimes she regretted it, but only sometimes.

_fin_


End file.
